••P154-159_Lagos_S07.F.qxd 7/20/07 11:25 AM Page 154 TRAFFIC STALLS BECOME MARKET STALLS ON THE BRIDGES OF THE WORLD’S FASTEST GROWING CITY PROPERTY OF AZURETEXT & PHOTOGRAPHYMAGAZINE ROBERT NEUWIRTH Lagos is the modern mega-city of sub-Saharan Africa, a metropolis of between nine and 15 million people, depending on who’s counting and where they draw the lines. It is gaining 3,000 new residents every day.” The United Nations has estimated that in eight years the population of this Nigerian megalopolis will reach 23 million, which would make it the third- biggest city in the world. It is a high-contrast place, where computers are sold from stick-built kiosks that have no electricity, and multinationals make piles of money from informal streetside stalls. When it comes to busi- ness, Lagos is the equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph: a point in the world that contains everything. It is impossibly polluted, impossibly crowded, impossibly annoying, impossibly haphazard. This vision – of Lagos as the urban nadir, the most vile, squalid, and criminal place on the planet, site of government corruption and source of annoying scam spam – has long dominated writings on the city, and has even been parroted with pride by Lagosians themselves. In contrast, Rem Koolhaas, who spent four years researching the city, has put forward a less desolate, more nuanced view – seeing Lagos as an often self-built and organic conurbation full of social messages. Lagos, Koolhaas says, has much 154 SEPTEMBER 2007 AZURE ••P154-159_Lagos_S07.F.qxd 7/19/07 12:24 PM Page 155 LEFT THE EKO BRIDGE, BUILT BETWEEN 1965 AND 1975, HAS HAWKERS ON ITS UPPER SIDE AND THE 700 MERCHANTS WHO MAKE UP THE ABASSA ALAKORO SHOE AND BAG MAR- KET UNDERNEATH IT. RIGHT JUST A FEW HUNDRED METRES AWAY, THE CARTER BRIDGE IS A 15-YEAR-OLD METASTASIZATION OF THE NEARBY IDUMOTA MARKET. to teach us about the future of cities and the evolutionPROPERTY of their structures. OF He AZURE MAGAZINE admits that Lagos is “a zone of incredible frictions.” But, he says, “even with- out organization, it is already really powerful.” Lagos is discordant and degraded, and the city’s infrastructure is appalling. The power that Koolhaas alludes to comes from the people, not the city’s built form. Lagosians are too busy to worry about their city’s place in the base. But the city has changed them, too. Lagos’s Eko and Carter bridges global urban prospect. They make their way, nonetheless, as they occupy are not notable design achievements. These neighbouring crossings over every centimetre of public space for commerce. Lagos Lagoon have no looping cables or ornate girders. They are functional “The informal economy in Lagos takes down all the boundaries of what concrete and rebar platforms balanced on pilings sunk into the muck. you would normally associate with the city – the street, public/private, The Eko and the Carter carry thousands of cars, trucks and buses every tree, house, road, everything,” says Papa Omotayo, a director of O + O day – most often snarled in massive jams locals call go-slows. But that is not Architectural Design, based in Lagos and London, and a member of the what makes these bridges so central. The people of Lagos, as in unrestricted British architectural collective Bukka. “The demand for economic activities capitalist embryos everywhere from eastern Europe to the Pearl River Delta, takes over everything.” have acted with utter disregard for what urban planers might say, and have Nowhere is this more apparent than on the two principal bridges that link cobbled together a marketplace where the mass of people is. So these bridges, Lagos Island, the city’s oldest settled section, with the mainland of Nigeria, with their stopped cars and trucks making much of the Lagosian population where the mass of residents live. a captive audience, have become shopping centres. Great bridges change city life. The Brooklyn Bridge, which linked America’s Carter and Eko, utterly transformed from their original intent by the will biggest city to its fourth largest city when it was completed in 1883, helped and needs of the people, are the haphazard African versions of two more- pave the way for the unification of New York into one metropolis 15 years famous bridges: the Ponte Vecchio in Florence and Istanbul’s Galata Bridge. later. The Confederation Bridge finally brought Prince Edward Island, These crossings were designed equally for commerce and for transport. Canada’s one totally offshore province, into the fold. In Lagos, the bridges The Eko and the Carter were made for traffic, but they have become vehicles have changed the city, certainly, allowing it to grow out of its original island for commerce. SEPTEMBER 2007 AZURE 155 ••P154-159_Lagos_S07.F.qxd 7/20/07 11:25 AM Page 157 YOU NEED TO DESIGN NEIGHBOURHOODS THAT ALLOW PEOPLE TO TRADE ON THE STREETS WITHOUT CONTESTING WITH CARS. THIS WORKS A LOT BETTER THAN POURING CONCRETE SOMEWHERE AND EXPECTING THE Poultry, has been operating in the shaded underbellyPROPERTY of the Eko Bridge OF for AZUREINFORMAL MAGAZINE MERCHANTS TO OBEY SOME KIND 20 years. Though much more crowded than it was two decades ago, this OF GOVERNMENT RULES wholesale and retail market remains primitive. There’s no electricity here, so merchants buy blocks of ice, which they place at the bottom of massive old iceboxes that insulate the chilled birds from the heat. As Segun spoke, several men outside his small stall slung a hairless white goat carcass on top of one of the freezers, which they had covered with a large piece of brown cardboard. As several of them began debating the price, one of Tunisia Atlantic them sharpened his knife. Ocean Morocco The market rents the space from the Nigerian government, paying Algeria 1.4 million naira a year, or a little less than US$11,000. Yet despite that Libya Western official recognition, Adeleye admits that his primary business is actually Sahara against the law. Like many local vendors, he smuggles his goods into Nigeria Lagos Mainland Lagos Lagoon Mauritania from the Republic of Benin, to the west. Mali Niger Adeleye likes doing business under the bridge. It is a secure and shaded Chad Senegal Burkina environment – perfect, he says, for birds. But he wants modern accoutrements, Faso Lagos Island Guinea Benin electricity and refrigeration, so he can build his business. The government, Nigeria Sierra To go Leone Côte Ghana he suggests, should renovate the bridge as a better place for commerce. Ivoire Central Afri Liberia Lagos Republic Cameroon Despite the vitality of these markets, the state government would very much like to wipe them out. “This is all going to change soon,” says Francisco A. THE THREE BRIDGES – THE EKO, THE CARTER Abosede, commissioner of the Lagos State Ministry of Physical Planning AND THE LONG THIRD MAINLAND BRIDGE – THAT CONNECT THE ORIGINAL ISLAND and Urban Development. “We have a master plan based on the same prin- OF LAGOS TO MAINLAND NIGERIA ALLOWED BOTH THE CITY AND ITS ECONOMY TO ciples as Shanghai’s.” EXPAND EXPONENTIALLY. SEPTEMBER 2007 AZURE 157 ••P154-159_Lagos_S07.F.qxd 7/19/07 12:24 PM Page 156 LEFT THE IDUMOTA MARKET IS HOME TO ALL MANNER OF RETAILERS AS WELL AS IMPORT- ERS, EXPORTERS, AND PRODUCERS OF THE WORLD’S THIRD-LARGEST FILM INDUSTRY, KNOWN INTERNATIONALLY AS NOLLYWOOD. RIGHT ABOUT 80 PER CENT OF LAGOS’S RAPIDLY INCREASING POPULATION IS AFFILI- ATED WITH THE CITY’S INFORMAL ECONOMY, GOING TO WORK IN MARKETS LIKE THE ONE ON AND UNDER CARTER BRIDGE IN A CHAOTIC next to a mother and daughter hawking flashlights. As the workday progress- MERCANTILE ENVIRONMENT. PROPERTY OF AZURE MAGAZINE es, the bridge gets an added influx, becoming a bus depot as well as a public marketplace. Scores of battered yellow buses known as danfo and molue (danfo are van-sized jitneys; molue are the size of larger school buses) take over two additional lanes of the bridge. The one lane that remains open swarms with The Carter Bridge is the older of the two, dating from the British colonial pedestrians and okada, the city’s ubiquitous, unregulated motorcycle taxis. era. Named for Sir Gilbert Carter, the governor of Lagos when the bridge The turmoil of the Carter Bridge reveals a key fact about Lagos: the was built in 1897, the bridge quickly became one of the city’s chief commercial informal sector is the most dynamic and fastest-growing part of the city. thoroughfares, with 2.6 million people crossing during an average year at Eighty per cent of the people who live in Lagos work in the informal econ- the start of the 20th century. omy, which accounts for more than two-thirds of Nigeria’s gross domestic The Carter Bridge rises from Idumota, a crowded market district on Lagos product. This gives informal workers unusual economic power: about Island that is home to thousands of import/export businesses, a bewilder- US$125 billion worth. The unemployment and the massive social upheaval ing array of retailers, and even many of the producers of Nigeria’s famed and misery that would exist if the thousands of people who immigrate to Nollywood videos (Nigeria’s film industry ranks as the world’s third largest, Lagos every day weren’t able to find work could quickly lead to social and behind Hollywood and Bollywood). The narrow streets of Idumota have political anarchy. The informal sector is what holds the country together long been thick with street merchants, and, metre by metre, lane by lane, and what determines its shape. These bridges are not just connecting Lagos, over the past 15 years or so, they have taken over the bridge.